Digital Factory selects Crime&tech and Trustfull for Proof-of-Concept with CA Auto Bank

In recent months, CA Auto Bank has selected six innovative projects from the top 150 proposed to Digital Factory, the open innovation platform created in collaboration with the Incubator of Politecnico di Torino (I3P) and in partnership with the “Start & Pulse” innovation programme at Crédit Agricole Personal Finance & Mobility, to explore new solutions and technologies that can contribute to its digital transformation.

The selected projects then engaged in an experiment, by implementing a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) in the field, aimed at testing and validating the best solutions presented to the digital bank for each of the thematic clusters. In the field of fraud prevention, two up-and-coming entrepreneurial projects were selected: Crime&tech and Trustfull.

“During the evaluation and selection of the numerous applications received by Digital Factory, we had the opportunity to learn about some really interesting and innovative projects, many of which have the potential to bring value to our business”, noted Piera Elsa Varone and Eduardo Dominici, respectively Anti-Fraud Manager and Underwriting Manager at CA Auto Bank. “The launch of Proof-of-Concepts with the two start-ups selected by CA Auto Bank is a valuable opportunity to experiment with new solutions in the complex context of a digital bank, which has always been committed to meeting the growing needs of international customers and the latest challenges in the prevention of and fight against fraud”.

From academic research to crime prevention

Crime&tech srl is the Italian university spin-off founded in 2015 by Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and Transcrime, an inter-university research centre on crime and innovation. The company translates Transcrime's academic research into crime prevention solutions for the public and private sectors. It develops analyses and tools to assess, prevent and reduce security-related risks, supports due diligence and business integrity control processes, and provides criminal risk screening and monitoring systems. Its tools have been adopted by government authorities, banks and companies in Italy and abroad.

“Crime&tech was created to transfer the innovations of Transcrime-Università Cattolica’s scientific research into applications to protect legality and economic/financial security”, noted Ernesto Savona, Director of Transcrime and President of Crime&tech. “Preventing criminal risks requires an interdisciplinary approach and a solid technological and data analytics component. This is how our tools strengthen customers’ ability to detect fraud, money laundering and other illicit schemes at an early stage. Partnering with CA Auto Bank and I3P will enable us to broaden the impact of our solutions and initiate new synergies”.

Risk assessment through identity intelligence

Founded in 2020, Milan-based firm Trustfull launched its project in 2021 and successfully completed a €5 million seed investment round the following year. The platform developed by Trustfull examines hundreds of datasets from the analysis of users' digital footprints in real time – such as phone numbers, e-mail and IP addresses, devices and browsers used – to evaluate and manage transactions, logins, registrations and new account creations with no impact on the user experience and in complete security. Using proprietary machine learning algorithms, Trustfull provides risk assessment models for applications such as credit assessment, fraud prevention, Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures and lead qualification.

“The selection of our platform by as leading a player as CA Auto Bank is cause for great satisfaction, a sign of confidence in Trustfull’s technical capabilities and its extreme attention to data security”, said Paolo Mardegan, Co-Founder & Sales Director for Italy at Trustfull. “As an anti-fraud service provider, we are committed to staying one step ahead and to developing solutions that fully prevent falsified identity issues in the IT field. We look forward to working with the Digital Factory team to develop integrations tailored to CA Auto Bank’s digital assets”.